Here's your quick guide to some of the fantastic new additions to the Greenbelt 09 line-up…

Athlete
Novello Award-winning indie-rock heavyweights Athlete produce an epic but intimate sound redolent of Coldplay and Snow Patrol.  We're delighted that they've agreed to headline the Mainstage on Monday evening, for what will surely be a special end to the weekend.

Ockham's Razor
Pictured above, Ockham's Razor is three aerial artists who specialise in creating physical theatre around new pieces of aerial equipment.  Arresting, light-hearted, daring and very entertaining, they'll be performing twice in the Big Top (Friday evening and a Saturday matinee) – don't miss it.

Go To Gaza, Drink The Sea
Award-winning director Justin Butcher's play is a highly atmospheric piece that promises to transport the audience directly to Gaza to experience what happened during the recent Israeli military assault.  We were so keen to add Go To Gaza to the line-up that the company have cut short their run at the Edinburgh Festival to appear at Greenbelt; we're sure you'll be glad they did.

Michael Ward
Author of Planet Narnia and presenter of BBC's Narnia Tales, which look at the secret themes behind C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia series.  But is it really possible that Lewis could have invented and kept such a secret?  How come nobody has noticed this secret before?  Does this hidden theme matter?  How does it relate to Lewis's Christian beliefs?  Michael Ward provides answers…

Abdul-Rehman Malik
A London-based journalist, educator and contributing editor at Q-News – a leading Muslim current affairs magazine.  Abdul-Rehman is currently senior project manager for the Radical Middle Way, a community-led initiative that seeks to encourage critical civic participation and the values of public service, mercy and social justice amongst young British Muslims.

Sir John Tavener: The Protecting Veil, and The Veil of the Temple: Five Anthems
A classical concert featuring the work of Sir John Tavener. The Protecting Veil is a composition for cello and strings that was completed for the BBC Proms twenty years ago this summer, and the Five Anthems capture some of the most memorable moments of Tavener’s all-night vigil The Veil of the Temple.

Just one more small slice of the lineup for 2009

We talk to Agents of Future, an ultra-participatory emerging church group from Portland Oregon, Barbara Nice stand-up comic creation of Janice Conolly, Jasper Fforde best-selling fantasy novelist, Ed Richmond about Keep Monday Special (KMS) at this year's Festival, Yaron from The Apples, Israeli funk outfit headlining the KMS Ball, Martin Wroe about this year's theme, 'Standing in the Long Now', and Beki Bateson, Greenbelt Festival Director, about just some of the ways in which she thinks the Festival is special.

Click here to download the enhanced .m4a podcast file (32.2MB).

Or stream the audio using the player below.

Or if you still prefer good old MP3 format click here (32MB).

Timings – so you can dip in and out if you want to:

00.00 – 02.20 – Intro
02.20 – 06.50 – Agents of Future
06.50 – 09.30 – Barbara Nice
09.30 – 12.55 – Jasper Fforde
12.55 – 14.22 – Ed Richmond on 'Keep Monday Special'
14.22 – 15.46 – The Apples
15.46 – 18.30 – Martin Wroe on 'Standing in the Long Now'
18.30 – 21.00 – Festival Director, Beki Bateson
21.00 – 22.58 – Outro

Resources and links

Agents of Future
Click here for their MySpace site
Click here for a nice description of their music.
Click here for our own Ben Edson's interview with AoF.

Barbara Nice
for Barbara's website.
Click here to see her on Facebook.

Click here to browse and view all Barbara's Comedy Guides on YouTube.
Click here to see her crowd surfing (yes, that's right) at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London.

Jasper Fforde
Click here for Jasper's website.

Also check out Jasper's books; The Fourth Bear, The Big Over Easy and the highly-successful Thursday Next series

Keep Monday Special
Details will be announced here soon

The Apples
Click here for their MySpace site.

Standing in the Long Now
Click here for Martin Wroe's piece on this year's Festival theme.
Click here for the Long Now Foundation website.

Soundtrack

Athlete – You Got The Style / In Between 2 States
Zero 7 – Home
Agents of Future – Peace on its Feet / Did What You Promised
The Apples – The Power
Theme from Max & Paddy's Road to Nowhere / Phoenix Nights
U2 – Beautiful Day
Eno – Always Returning

Credits

• Narrated by Phil Smith and Grace Wroe
• Narration recorded by Iain Archer
• Mixed and Edited – bigJohn Noble
• Written and Executive Produced by Paul Northup
• Co-production – bigJohn Noble
• Field Recording – Paul Northup

Pictured at the head of this blog post, The Apples

Martin Wilson – Oranges and Lemons

Last year at Greenbelt an undoubted highlight of the Visual Arts programme was Martin Wilson's little exhibition of photographs and talk about how he creates them in our Artists Forums, and in his own words here is how he does it : 

'My pictures are painstakingly created frame by frame on 35mm film. I get the whole film developed, scan it, then piece the final image together on the computer, making a large contact sheet. It’s only when the completed film strips are laid out side by side in the contact sheets that the final image appear.

Each work usually takes months to complete, as each frame is obsessively taken in sequence. No pasting together after the event, no cheating in Photoshop! If I make a mistake or take a frame out of place I start the film again from the beginning.'

If you want to see some of his wonderful images take a look at his website and you will begin to understand just how much painstaking work goes into creating them: www.martinwilson.net

We are really pleased to hear Martin has one of his pieces in The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, which is now open to the public. And you can also see his work this weekend if you are near Leigh on Sea, or in Leicester at Bishop Street Methodist Church in July. 

This year Martin is developing a few ideas, and will be creating a piece for us during the festival – a bit of a creative challenge for him, but given the nature of the way he works and the Long Now theme we won't exhibit the finished piece until the Festival in 2010 – we're confident it will be worth the wait!

We're regularly updating our line-up pages, but with so much good stuff already on there we thought we'd highlight just a few of the names that we've put up in the last couple of weeks, in case anyone's missed them…

Royksopp
Norwegian electronic duo whose third album has recently been released to rave reviews – BBC 6Music immediately flagged it as their Album of the Day, and said this: "What a comeback. Junior is pretty damn perfect… very few albums will be as enjoyable as this in 2009. Brilliant."  For the full review, click here.

The Welcome Wagon
A husband-and-wife duo from New York, The Welcome Wagon are linking up with a UK-based choir to add depth to their gospel sound.  Check out their MySpace, which has songs from their Sufjan Stevens-produced debut album.

Gene Robinson
The Bishop of New Hampshire is speaking for the first time at Greenbelt; topics include staying in touch with God when coping with criticism and Homosexuality: What the Bible really says, and why it matters so much.

Billy Childish
Artist, author, poet, songwriter, photographer, filmmaker… There's a lot more to Billy Childish (pictured above) than just the world's greatest moustache. Some of Billy's work will be shown as part of the Visionaries exhibition, and we'll also be giving away a limited edition piece of Billy's art to one lucky festivalgoer.

Agents of Future
The US jalopy-gospellers (their words, not ours) are planning to collaborate with as many festivalgoers as possible over the weekend.  Extravagant, enthusiastic and certainly experimental worship.

Iain Sinclair
Author and one of Britain's foremost psychogeographers, Sinclair will be in discussion with another keen urban explorer John Davies, in what is sure to be a fascinating look at 'place' and its signifiance.

Over on the Greenbelt website, we've started a new series called Introductions:, telling us about some of the highlights of the Greenbelt 09 line-up.  Peter Graystone from our Performing Arts team is starting us off, with an introduction to the very funny Alex Horne – click here to read it.

by Ed Richmond, Greenbelt Music Coordinator

Grrr, politicians, dontcha just hate 'em?

I work in the media and personally, on one level, I'm very glad that the searing eye of the free press has turned its demonizing gaze back towards the great and good of Westminster so I can have a bit of a breather.

Of course, on another level, I'm not so chuffed at one more example of the mainstream print media desperately shoring up dwindling income by digging deep into its well-worn bag of tricks for a particularly gnarled old chestnut; the moral panic.

Most recently, for a change, it's been us broadcasters of culture, rather than the cultural innovators themselves, that have found ourselves in the spotlight, but in the past Hip Hop, Acid House, Heavy Metal, Hippies, Mods and Rockers and Music Hall (that's right, Music Hall y'all) have all been both the cause and the signifier of extreme moral decline in their day according to journalists.

We do seem to be entering some kind of neo-Victorian era where piano legs needs must be covered up for fear of offending delicate sensibilities. Where the perception of purity is more important than its practice. Where extravagantly budgeted promotional films are shelved because showing them could be deemed offensive in a recession; not 'spending' said extravagant budget, but being 'seen' to have spent it.

Inside production teams, there has been a real fear of being the next neck on the block; an unspoken policy that, 'if in doubt, cut it out'. For instance, a radio producer intimately known to this blogger (ahem) may recently have cut the words 'buck' and 'ship' from a track due to be broadcast on radio because they 'sounded' close enough to offensive language to not be worth risking it. Now I ask you; who do you know that needs protecting from bucks and ships?

Just to be clear, I'm not remotely interested in defending the right to be shoddy, rude, crude, intrusive, lazy or just plain offensive on air. I don't want to dwell on, or belittle the wrongs and wrongs of what happened when Brand met Ross, but am concerned about the fallout and how it shapes our arts, music and wider culture.

On Radio 4 (bastion of all things pure btw) a few weeks ago I heard the excellent nail-on-head quote, "we are more concerned with bad words than we are about good deeds." It's a sentiment that's stayed with me since I heard it, and over time I've pasted 'good arts/literature/music' over the last bit every now and again too.

When booking music for Greenbelt, we as a group often find ourselves applying the 'WHY?' test to acts that may not immediately be obvious choices: have they something challenging to say, do they align themselves to similar aims to the festival, are they pushing boundaries artistically or are they just excellent in their field? We're also keenly aware of the the breadth of the Greenbelt audience, and often strong language is a real concern that we wrestle with.

Now more than ever though, in a culture quick to whiten sepulchers, perhaps it's even more important that we listen to what artists, performers, writers and campaigners have to say, and not get all hot-under-the-headlines because of the language they choose to use.

Ed Richmond chairs the Greenbelt music group and is a radio producer for the BBC in Wales. The views in this blog are his own and do not represent those of the BBC.

The Guardian have kicked-off their feature on Scandanavian music (which they're calling 'Scandipop' – no, really) by interviewing Greenbelt 09 headliners Royksopp - click here to read it.

Visionaries: working in the margins
Guided Tour

Wednesday 10th June
6.30pm – 7.30pm
£7.50 incl. wine
Wallspace, All Hallows On The Wall, 83 London Wall, London EC2M 5ND

This year Greenbelt is bringing Trust Greenbelt recipients Wallspace’s exhibition ‘Visionaries’, to the festival. Whilst at the festival there will be a couple of guided tours of it, and Malcolm & Meryl, Wallspace’s curators, have kindly offered to do a pre-festival tour of the exhibition for us as well.

Downland Discourse, Noel White. Photo: Torsten White

For more info on the exhibition & Wallspace, click here, or see below.

—
Visionaries brings together artists working in this honourable and challenging tradition, which includes William Blake, Goya and Samuel Palmer – those who explore with passion the territories of the spiritual, the religious and the human condition. Their vigorous work spans almost 100 years. The exhibition will include works by a number of painters, who although they are no longer alive, are still hugely influential: Stanley Spencer, Cecil Collins, Norman Adams, Tony Goble and Albert Herbert. They are joined by contemporary artists: Peter Howson, Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Noel White, Paul Martin, Brian Whelan, the Chapman brothers, Billy Childish, Harry Adams and Adam Neate (tbc).

The prophetic tradition, with its history of dramatic enactment, is a rich one. Visionaries will therefore include a performance piece by Kit Poulson and David Shillinglaw will paint 'live' during the period of the exhibition.

The exhibition has been curated by Wallspace and will be on show at All Hallows on the Wall in the City of London from 20 May to 10 June. It will then travel to Greenbelt Arts Festival, at Cheltenham Racecourse for the August Bank Holiday weekend, from 28 to 31 August.

On Friday, the Financial Times ran an interview with Reem Kelani, who's playing at Greenbelt 09.  Reem talked a lot about Palestinian cookery and gave the FT her favourite recipe.  You can read the whole interview here, and here's the recipe for Reem's Chicken and onion mussakhan wraps:

Known as “muhammar” in Galilee and Nazareth, “mussakhan” can be made into wraps, or it can be made into a pizza, with the chicken and onion piled on to a thin dough base and baked. The latter is served as a main dish, while the wraps are served as a starter. 

This is Reem Kelani’s recipe, and it comes from her sister’s mother-in-law, Izdihar Afyouni. It serves 4-6 people.

Ingredients
500g skinned and boneless chicken breasts
Juice of half a lemon 
½ cup Palestinian extra virgin olive oil, plus extra to brush the wraps
1 tsp Palestinian mixed spices
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
4 medium onions, finely chopped
1 tbsp sumac, plus extra for garnish
¼ cup pine nuts, toasted in a hot oven
2 large shraak (Palestinian flat bread) or markouk (Lebanese handkerchief bread)

Method
● Cut the chicken into long, thin strips and marinate with the lemon juice, half the olive oil, mixed spices and salt and pepper for at least two hours.
● Put the chicken in a pre-heated saucepan, cover and cook in its own marinade, shaking the pan every now and then for about half an hour. Then add 1 cup boiling water and cook until the water evaporates and the chicken is done.
● Fry the chopped onions in the remaining olive oil until cooked but not coloured – add a little water to let them cook thoroughly without caramelising. 
● Add the sumac, toasted pine nuts and salt to taste. Cut the bread into rectangular pieces, making sure it is wide enough to roll over into wraps.
● Spread some of the onion and nuts mixture on each piece of bread, then spread some chicken over the onion, sprinkle a little more sumac and roll into long, cigar-shaped wraps.

If anyone cooks this, let us know how it goes!

Just one small slice of the lineup for 2009

We talk to Rachel Stringer, Greenbelt's Head of Content, about her role, its joys and challenges, Shlomo about beatboxing, The Vocal Orchestra and coming back to Greenbelt, Mark Vernon about agnosticism and the School of Life, and Vito Aiuto from The Welcome Wagon about their debut album and Sufjan Stevens' friendship.

Click here to download the enhanced .m4a podcast file (31 MB).

Or stream the audio using the player below.

Or if you still prefer good old MP3 format click here (30MB).

Timings – so you can dip in and out if you want to:

00.00 – 01.44 – Intro
01.44 – 03.42 – Rachel – on her role as Head of Content
03.42 – 08.38 – Shlomo
08.38 – 09.22 – Rachel – highs
09.22 – 12.56 – Mark Vernon
12.56 – 14.47 – Rachel – the challenges
14.47 – 18.50 – Vito Aiuto from The Welcome Wagon
18.50 – 20.15 – Rachel – some other highlights
20.15 – 21.50 – Outro

Resources and links

Shlomo's website

Mark Vernon's website

The School of Life website

The Welcome Wagon's website

And click here, here and here to read what Sufjan Stevens writes about some of the songs on their new album (and to listen to the material too).

The Greenbelt 2009 lineup

Soundtrack (click to buy in iTunes)

Sufjan Stevens -UFO Sighting / The Tallest Man, The Broadest Shoulders
Royksopp – A Feeling of Care
The Welcome Wagon – Sold to the Nice Rich Man / I am a Stranger
Sway – Fit 4 a King / Letters to Heaven
Shlomo – Kernia / Lyrical Distortion

Credits

• Narrated by Phil Smith and Grace Wroe
• Narration recorded by Iain Archer
• Mixed and Edited – bigJohn Noble
• Written and Executive Produced by Paul Northup
• Co-production – bigJohn Noble
• Field Recording – Paul Northup